Where Are Chaucer's “Retracciouns”?

FLORILEGIUM 10, 1988-91 WHERE ARE CHAUCER’S “RETRACCIOUNS”? Victor Yelverton Haines Chaucer s retracciouns” are to be found throughout his work where he ironically presents a meaning from which he pulls back, withdraws, or re tracts. In the difference between the meaning retracted from and the right meaning “retracted to,” the reader’s response is exercised in an ethical test. Chaucer’s good “entente” engages the reader in the rhetoric of “retraccioun” as it applies throughout his work and not just in what has been called his “Retraction” at the end of “The Parson’s Tale.”1 When Chaucer the scriptor writes of his conversation with the Monk, for example, “And I seyde his opinion was good,” Chaucer’s intention in its ethical context is to pull the reader back, to retract, from a straight reading that the Monk’s opinion is in fact good. This is one of many of Chaucer’s “retracciouns,” as he refers to them in the plural at the end of The Canter bury Tales in the Epilogue to “The Parson’s Tale.” In fact, the meaning we are familiar with in the so-called “Retraction,” that Chaucer wished to re tract or annul the works themselves, is itself a meaning from which Chaucer intended us to retract. It is there in the text just as the meaning that the Monk s opinion is good is in the text, and Chaucer intended it to be there: it would protect him from vicious censors. But he also intended a more subtle and moral meaning for the “Retraction,” which modern readers by and large have missed. A right reading of the “Retraction” involves obsolete 127 128 FLORILEGIUM 10, 1988-91 meanings of four key words in Chaucer’s text: intent, revoke, retract, and guilt, words so familiar we do not suspect them of any alien meaning. Ex pressed in this vocabulary, furthermore, are concepts usually missing in the presumptions of modern understanding. First, the reader’s response must be considered an ethical response. As the Gawain postscript says: “Hony soyt qui mal pense.” In that we are all to tell our story in redeemed history, we are to become story tellers like the pilgrims and to practise, as David Williams puts it, both good “audienceship and authorship” (100). The intentionality of a text is a communal project of both author and reader. As we might expect of a culture of the book, Lee Patterson points out, medieval misprison brought with it little but anxiety. Far from freeing read ers from the burden of the past, it delivered them into the hands of the enemy: witness the two most famous of all medieval misreaders, Paolo and Francesca. And they are significantly compared to other exemplary read ers, Augustine reading the Scriptures in his garden and Abelard and Heloise reading the auctores together. (141) In his oeuvre, Chaucer frequently expresses his concern for the reader’s intent; and in the “Retraction,” Chaucer’s statement of his own intent im plies the intentionality of the text and the reader’s own learning in the intent of “oure doctrine.” Unless the reader’s response is understood in its ethical moment, it is difficult to figure out why Chaucer could be asking for forgiveness of his “giltes,” namely for “translacions and enditynges” just after saying “‘Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine,’ and that is myn entente.” It must be clear that there is no book a saint cannot read, nor any text a sinner cannot corrupt. Some reader response may indeed be wicked; and a reader can sin. But can good authorial intention have any guilt for such sin? This question involves a second idea, also foreign to our minds — that the notion of guilt allows for involuntary sin, that one can be guilty through defaute for what happens by accident as in manslaughter; for the wickedness of others, such as minors in one’s care; for what one fails to realize in sins of omission, as in the unconscious heritage of racism, sexism, original sin, and so forth, or the thoughtless personal failures of self-righteousness and pride. In order to understand the text of Chaucer’s “Retraction” as he meant it, we must be prepared to understand that he could feel guilt for how readers had failed to get the moral point of some of his irony and had fallen into vicious interpretation and been wicked in, for example, condoning the behaviour of the Monk. The moral tests Chaucer set might have been too hard. The failure of various different readers, which Chaucer could have VICTOR YELVERTON HAINES 129 observed in his lifetime, would be an ethical failure in the joint intentionality of reader and author. Ethical failure is sin, the very failure Chaucer prays “that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne.” One further proclivity of mediaeval interpretation needs to be rein forced, perhaps, if we are to get what Chaucer is saying: the view from a tem poral aevum ensures the force of the simple present tense of “revoke”: “to call back a vice from people.” Chaucer revokes vanity in the texts he mentions now and also when they are written. Such a summary introduction to the world version of Chaucer’s text has to be elaborated in detailed verbal analysis. But perhaps it may already make possible a glimpse of what Chaucer means in what he writes. Without such a glimpse, no amount of analysis can make sense of a picture that if you do not get it is not there. So even though I have not yet made my case, I plead with my reader to try and see it “my” way, at least just once. Take care to read the antecedent of “the whiche” as “worldly vanitees.” Chaucer writes: For oure book seith, “A1 that is writen is writen for oure doctrine,” and that is myn entente. / Wherfore I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; / and namely of my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns: / as is the book of Troilus; the book also of Fame; the book of the xxv. Ladies; [etc.], (1083-86) If Chaucer had wished to emphasize the meaning that the books them selves should be annulled, he would have left out the “as is” and just listed the books, “the book of Troilus, etc.” If he had wished to emphasize his intended meaning, rather than hide it a little bit, he could have said “as in” rather than “as is” ; but he maintains both meanings by saying “as is” followed by a list of books, which as books, however, must be in apposition not to “vanitees” but to “translacions and enditynges.” As a Christian poet who has just been preaching in the voice of the Par son, Chaucer has the welfare of his readers on his mind and is speaking of his responsibility for them in the serious ethical moment of reading when they do not get his irony. That this is what Chaucer is saying in the “Retraction” cannot be proved or disproved by looking to his oeuvre to see if he has ac tually done what he said. This would require a search under every trope and phrase for a bad intention — clearly impossible without begging the initial question of intention in the “Retraction.” Irony operates within an ethical context at particular points, so that what one is to retract and pull back from is not determined by the mere possibility of irony. Chaucerian irony is 130 FLORILEGIUM 10, 1988-91 governed by Chaucer’s ethics. Given ethics twisted enough, even the “Re traction” itself could be sarcastic irony, although its coherence would make it a most bitter opposite of what is said. Our shared intuition of Chaucer’s rhetorical strategy does, however, support a non-sarcastic reading of his fi nal supplication. We are familiar with the good humoured compassion of Chaucerian irony that encourages readers to exercise their own moral fac ulties in judging characters and in debating the moral principles through which a narrative is constituted. That this intuition is the basis for a co herent reading of what Chaucer says in the “Retraction” may be discovered in a detailed explication of the “Retraction” itself. The Parson ends his tale or “tretys” in the dialectics of heavenly ac cess: in this fallen world, we may purchase the blissful reign “by poverte espiritueel, and the glorie by lowenesse, the plentee of joye by hunger and thurst, and the reste by travaille, and the lyf by deeth and mortificacion of synne” (1080), and as Chaucer might add, right interpretations by perennial “retracciouns” of wrong ones. After preaching holy doctrine in the voice of the Parson, the voice of the poet merges into that voice in a request for thanksgiving to Christ for any wisdom in the “tretys,” for Christ is the source of all wisdom: Now preye I to hem alle that herkne this litel tretys or rede, that if ther be any thyng in it that liketh hem, that therof they thanken oure Lord Jhesu Crist, of whom procedeth al wit and al goodnesse. (1081) The debate over the extension of the word “tretys” here hangs on whether there is a precise point dividing the Parson’s voice from the narra tor’s and then from Chaucer’s. Even without the rubric “Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve,” usually added before this line 1081, identifica tion of the “I” in this line as the Parson soon merges with the identification of subsequent “I’s” as the narrator and then Chaucer himself.

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